Australia's youth caught in deep pockets of disadvantage

Australia's auto industry troubles may flow on to the next generation of job seekers, as the South Australian town of Elizabeth already knows, with the country's second highest youth unemployment rate and deep pockets of disadvantage.

Transcript

LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: Holden workers in Victoria and South Australia are still digesting yesterday's grim ultimatum from the car maker's management that they may have to take a pay cut to keep their jobs.

The news from Holden comes just weeks after Ford announced it would close its production lines in 2016 and it's an especially brutal blow for workers at its plant in Elizabeth, north of Adelaide.

The community was once thriving, but these days it's mired in entrenched poverty and has the second highest youth unemployment rate in the country.

Reporter Vassil Malandris spent time in Elizabeth with a lost generation of young job seekers in search of a better life.

PRESENTER (archive footage, male voiceover): Elizabeth, South Australia. To you perhaps, just a name, but to us here in South Australia, a city, the newest planned city in the Commonwealth of Australia.

VASSIL MALANDRIS, REPORTER: This was the dream 55 years ago for the city of Elizabeth in the north of Adelaide. A model community with cheap housing and plentiful employment centred around the brand new Holden plant.

PRESENTER (archive footage, male voiceover): And General Motors Holdens is pretty big business up this way now with a modern, well-equipped factory in very pleasant surroundings. In the Elizabeth factory alone, over 1,500 people are employed on two shifts.

VASSIL MALANDRIS: It was also the first Australian city to be named after the young queen who paid a visit in 1960 amid much pomp and ceremony.

QUEEN ELIZABETH II: My husband and I are delighted to have been able to come and see Elizabeth and so many of its people. No-one could fail to be impressed by the design of the houses, each with its carefully-tended garden, with the green open spaces, the avenues of trees and the general air of well-being. May this town and its people prosper and develop in the years to come.

VASSIL MALANDRIS: But there's little evidence of that optimism now in Northern Adelaide. Many streets resemble a welfare ghetto and youth unemployment is 41 per cent, the second highest rate in the country after the Sunshine Coast.

20-year-old Breanna Hand never experienced prosperity. She grew up poor, dropped out of school in Year Nine and was homeless for much of her teenage years.

BREANNA HAND: I was sort of on the streets and stuff for a while, just getting into trouble, that sorta thing.

VASSIL MALANDRIS: What is it like on the streets, not knowing where you're gonna sleep?

BREANNA HAND: It's not good at all. I'd sort of just generally stick around one suburb, sort of just stay at ovals where it was still light so if people seen anything happened, you sorta know you would be OK. You see a lot of things that you really don't think you would see and a lot of things that you really don't ever want to see.

VASSIL MALANDRIS: Bryanna has never had a full-time job, but these days, she's trying to turn her life around. She's studying a hospitality course, but her flat has just been sold and she needs to find a steady job to secure another house.

BREANNA HAND: Ya can't rely on your parents or your friends or workmates, anything really - the Centrelink, government, you can't rely on them for the rest of your life. You're gonna get nowhere.

VASSIL MALANDRIS: Many people do rely on government handouts here and have done so ever since the decay and despair set in in the 1970s and '80s. When the fuel crisis hit and cheap imported cars flooded the market, Holden sales nosedived. The working class city of Elizabeth was the worst-affected manufacturing region in the country, and over time, the 15,000 homes built for factory workers were vacated and turned into public housing.

After so many waves of redundancies, 19-year-old car enthusiast Phillip Flynn has given up his dream of working at the Holden plant. He fears the industry is doomed.

PHILIP FLYNN: Just letting everyone go, yeah. You really just can't find a place where they're hiring. There's just not enough business.

VASSIL MALANDRIS: Phillip would rather stay home with his parents and rely on Centrelink benefits until he finds full-time employment. But he's bored and frustrated. He is now enrolled in an intensive training course for troubled or unemployed youth.

Youth worker Kelly Drury says there are currently 700 young people in programs run by the children's charity BoysTown ranging from high school education to job placements. It's one of the few success stories in Northern Adelaide. Three quarters of the students eventually get jobs.

KELLY DRURY, YOUTH WORKER: In that six months they then realise for themself I guess the value of employment. They see what it means to have money in their pocket, they see what it means to be able to support their families, they see what it means to I guess have that sense of worth.

VASSIL MALANDRIS: But it's a bleaker picture for Bryanna and her friend, 22-year-old of mother of two Jenna, who are working on their CVs.

After receiving more than 50 knockbacks between them from prospective employers, they can't help but feel they're being judged by where they live, not what they can do.

Both have now resolved to move out of Elizabeth, which they see as their only chance of breaking the welfare cycle.

BREANNA HAND: I wanna get away from this place and just try and get a good job, get out there and make something of my life, not be stuck here.

JENNA: We've worked out what we want to do. We want to move and set the kids up so that they can have the life I want them to have.